1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique of transferring an image to a computer from a digital camera or another apparatus, for storing the image, and printing or e-mailing the image.
2. Related Background Art
In recent years, with the spread of digital cameras, it has become easy to photograph a large amount of images and to store the images in a personal computer (PC), and to print them by oneself, or to attach them to an e-mail and mail them.
Accordingly, a large number of pieces of image management software have been brought on sale, by which the image can be managed with a PC, printed and attached to an e-mail.
A representative example of the image management software is shown in FIG. 1. In this manner, when a folder containing an image to be displayed is selected from section 1, an image file in the folder is displayed in a thumbnail form (an image obtained by reducing in size and displaying the original image) in section 2, so that a user can easily see a large number of images at once. In this case, when a certain thumbnail image is selected and double-clicked in a section 3, the image can be enlarged and displayed in a separate window. Moreover, when a certain thumbnail is selected and printing is designated, the printing of the image can be executed. Furthermore, when a certain thumb nail is selected and “e-mailing” is designated, mail software is started and the image file is automatically attached to an e-mail.
FIG. 2 shows an example of a printing designation window.
A plurality of thumb nails are selected and “print . . . ” is selected from a menu or the like. Then, the window of FIG. 2 appears. Here, selected thumbnail images 207 are arranged and displayed. A horizontal number of frames×a vertical number of frames of images arranged in a sheet can be designated with frame number designations 201, 202. When the selected images are arranged in more than one sheet, the images can be checked for confirmation that they are the desired ones by pressing a former page button 204 or a next page button 205. Subsequently, when a print button is pushed, the images are printed according to the layout with a printer.
With the display of the thumbnail form, many images can preferably be seen at a glance, but each image size is small. Therefore, some image management software has a “slide show” function with which a plurality of selected thumbnail images are fully displayed over a screen and can continuously be seen. A first image of the selected images is displayed all over the screen, and the display is changed to the next image display by clicking a mouse or pressing an appropriate key. When this is repeated, the selected images can successively be displayed and seen all over the screen. In this case, the display can be returned to the previous image display by pressing an arrow key “←” or a specific key.
Many images are photographed with a digital camera, stored in the PC, and displayed in a list in the thumbnail form with the image management software. These images include an image out of focus, an image photographed with manual vibration, repeatedly photographed images of a similar scene or the same object, and the like.
In general, in consideration of a PC screen size, the thumbnail is prepared and displayed in a size of about 80×60 dots, or 160×120 dots at most. In this size of display, it is very difficult to distinguish an image that is out of focus, an image that was made during manual vibration, or the like. Moreover, it is also difficult to select a supposedly best photograph from among several repeatedly taken of the similar scene or the same object.
The user wants to print, e-mail or otherwise send a favorite photograph to an acquaintance, but as described above it is difficult to find the photograph from many images in the list display with such thumbnail size. Therefore, the user double-clicks the thumbnails one by one, enlarges and displays each image in a separate window and confirms whether the image is good or bad, or reproduces the images with the aforementioned slide show function to successively check the images. In this case, the user performs an operation of memorizing the favorite image, one returning to the thumbnail display screen, and re-selecting only the favorite image from the screen to print the image or attach the image to the e-mail.
As described above, finally the image is to be printed or attached to the e-mail. However, an operation of checking and selecting the image is not correlated with an operation of printing a result or attaching the result to the e-mail, and this is inconvenient in the user's operation.